There are many things Bob Monroe (CS'95,'99) never imagined. He never imagined returning to higher education once he earned his degrees. He never thought, when he did, he'd be at Tepper-the first class he ever attended at a business school was the one he taught. And he never imagined he'd one day be off-roading in the Arabian Desert in his family's Ford Explorer, listening to Johnny Cash, his wife and their three kids bouncing around with him.

Monroe's philosophy has always been to explore new frontiers. It led him to take several side projects while pursing his computer science PhD, including a paper titled, "Acme: An Architecture Description Interchange Language," which he co-authored with professors David Garlan (CS'83,'87) and David Wile.

After graduation, Monroe entered the dot-com era and found business success with a startup that eventually went public. Later, when Tepper began recruiting visiting professors with experience in the intersection between technology and business, Monroe was a natural fit. And when Carnegie Mellon opened its Qatar campus, that new frontier was impossible for him to resist. He went over to teach a course and loved it so much that he has stayed as associate dean.

He also never expected that the Acme paper he worked on as a PhD student would lead to one of the most influential and long-lasting software architecture languages ever developed. For the 20th anniversary of the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies Conference, it was selected as one of the 14 most influential papers ever entered into their proceedings.
-Bradley A. Porter (HS'08)